Corporate & Securities Law

Facebook is Jackin? for Vanity URLs

By Ryan Roberts

TechCrunch has an interesting story about how Facebook is revoking vanity URLs for violating Facebook’s policies and then giving them to companies.

This isn’t your typical namesquatting case because the person’s vanity URL was /harman and the alleged namequatter’s name is Harman. But Facebook still sent Harman a message notifying him that his vanity url did not have a “clear connection” to his identity. Uh, ok.

The /harman vanity URL was then given to Harman International, which tried to negotiate a transfer of the vanity URL only a few days earlier. Basically, someone at Harman International “friended” Harman on Facebook and then began the “negotiations.”

I also find this story interesting because one of my unresolved tweaks to this blog is to get my Facebook page to iframe via the explore drop-down. For some reason, my Facebook vanity url /startuplawyer brings up a “page not found” Facebook message:

I’ve tried multiple “support” requests from Facebook without answer. I would rather have a vanity URL of some derivate of my own name, but my name is pretty common so I lost out on the Facebook vanity URL grab.

If I don’t resolve the /startuplawyer issue on Facebook, I’ll probably just create a fan page for this blog and use that as my Facebook iframe on this site.

Full post as published by The Startup Lawyer on January 23, 2010 (boomark / email).